earlier life. The aged ministers of heraldry were set to work
(actually prolonging their days by an unexpected revival of interest in
their too well-worn function) at the search for some obscure rivulet of
Greek descent--later Byzantine Greek, perhaps,--in the Rosenmold
genealogy. No! with a hundred quarterings, they were as indigenous,
incorruptible heraldry reasserted, as the old yew-trees' asquat on the
heath.

And meantime those dreams of remote and probably adventurous travel
lent the youth, still so healthy of body, a wing for more distant
expeditions than he had ever yet inclined to, among his own wholesome
German woodlands. In long rambles, afoot or on horseback, by day and
night, he flung himself, for the resettling of his sanity, on the
cheerful influences of their simple imagery; the hawks, as if asleep on
the air below him; the bleached crags, evoked by late sunset among the
dark oaks; the water-wheels, with their pleasant murmur, in the
foldings of the hillside.

Clouds came across his heaven, little sudden clouds, like those which
in this northern latitude, where summer is at best but a flighty
visitor, chill out the heart, though but for a few minutes at a time,
of the warmest afternoon. He had fits of the gloom of other
people--their dull passage through and exit from the world, the
threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals--which,
unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled
into a gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times outward things
also would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadow about
him, almost as if there were indeed animation in the natural world,
elfin spirits in those inaccessible hillsides and dark ravines, as old
German poetry pretended, cheerfully assistant sometimes, but for the
most part troublesome, to their human kindred. Of late these fits had
come somewhat more frequently, and had continued. Often it was a weary,
deflowered face that his favourite mirrors reflected. Yes! people were
prosaic, and their lives threadbare:---all but himself and organist
Max, perhaps, and Fritz the treble-singer. In return, the people in
actual contact with him thought him a little mad, though still ready to
flatter his madness, as he could detect. Alone with the doating old
grandfather in their stiff, distant, alien world of etiquette, he felt
surrounded by flatterers, and would fain have tested the sincerity even
of Max, and Fritz who s